book reviews 481 to the author, scholars have too readily taken at face value a set oi ideals about local traditions that were institutionalized by the British who sought to know the local villages and adminis- ter the New Territories according to their inter- pretation oi indigenous society and native cus- tom. Cautioning against this wholesale adoption, Chun argues that "in order to under- stand the evolution oi rural Hong Kong society to the present day, one must effectively sepa- rate the epistemological assumptions and methodological practices that guided 'indirect rule' from the nature of those social institutions it was meant to regulate" (p. 36). This distinc- tion is vital. Writes Chun, It is important to reiterate that the British did not invent lineages, customs or villages in a Chinese context and instead that, whatever existed in a local context, it codified and in- stitutionalized practices and organizations according to its own (legal-cum-social struc- tural) rules rather than those of existing values and customs in ways that had ramifications for later social change. . . . The local con- text oi power that pits colonizer and colo- nized is in essence a contest of opposing mentalities and not just opposing interests perse, [p.40] According to Chun (ch. 2), as the disciplinary power of the state evolved throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries into ever more sophis- ticated and indirect processes of land control, the preservation oi tradition in effect meant that village society was "unconsciously ab- sorbed" (p. 97) into processes oi modern- ization and a Eurocentric rationalized order. In the postwar era, market capitalism sig- naled Hong Kong's emergence as a "society based on trade" where "market activity as a thing in itself came to define the pattern for so- cial action and the nature oi society" (p. 110). In chapter 3, Chun outlines what this dominant capitalist ideology cost Hong Kong as it, cou- pled with the mainland Chinese move to the New Territories in the 1950s, created intense pressures on land resources. This in turn re- sulted in rural land crises that greatly affected indigenous peoples. In a fascinating discus- sion, the author analyzes how the British politi- cal infrastructure gradually devolved to local grassroots organizations as a strategy to galva- nize local support. This shifted the practices oi colonial control to new arenas where the im- posed categories oi land use came to be regulated and managed by local authorities. In the name oi progress, certain lands were deemed rational as opposed to a fixed notion of traditional. In this process of classification, many indigenous villages were socially and politically restructured through the legal authority vested in applied land policy. Chun writes, "The fictions that drove the dynamics oi an emerging market society had important consequences not only for ushering in moder- nity but reifying tradition as well" (p. 170). Chun reflects upon the future oi anthropo- logical inquiry in the final chapter, which is worthy of considerable attention. Here he reit- erates how scholars analyzing the New Terri- tories limit themselves by ignoring colonial- ism, writing what amounts to "sanitized ethnographies extolling the pristine structures oi local society" (p. 305). Chun calls for a meth- odology that first deconstructs colonialism in order to then seriously question the taken-for- granted characteristics oi traditional society that are deeply embedded in a market econ- omy and modernist project. As Chun power- fully concl udes i n a statement that u nderscores the theoretical and methodological signifi- cance of his book: If anything, the subjective nature oi the vil- lage as a moral community is a complicated issue that can only be understood "locally" (from the inside out), thus deserves further scrutiny in its own right. Moreover by under- standing the household and village locally and egocentrically, one gets a very different sense of community that transcends both its agnatic and territorial boundaries, not to mention oi the outside "world" itself. An- thropological research of this kind should be theoretically seminal rather than marginal. Contrary to expectation, it has also hardly begun, [p. 315) Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Imagination. Caro- lyn Hamilton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1998. xii + 278 pp., map, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. ERIC WORBY Yale University Anthropologists—no less than historians— have increasingly come to regard colonial his- tories oi the colonized (or indeed the reverse) as something not only made but as something